Hatje Cantz Lars Eidinger O Mensch

“Man's destiny is man.” — Bertolt Brecht

Following Autistic Disco, O Mensch is the new photo book by Berlin actor Lars Eidinger. It combines photographs taken with a cell phone camera and an SLR camera over the last three years with some much older images. Eidinger's pictures only appear to be harmless snapshots on the surface. In a society of singularities and disappearing boundaries between humans and machines, the absurd reality of everyday life appears like a colossal photomontage. Probably from the perspective of an actor who knows that the coexistence of good and evil is at the core of every true and touching character, Lars Eidinger creates images that focus on human ambiguity. The Japanese poet Yoko Tawada, who lives in Berlin, has written short poems in the form of haikus to accompany individual works. This adds a poetic layer to the interpretive space.